Version 8 PDF.A POETICS of the CONTEMPORARY

A POETICS OF THE CONTEMPORARY BLACK CANADIAN CITY: CHARTING THE HISTORY OF BLACK URBAN SPACE IN FICTION AND POETRY BY BLACK CANADIAN WRITERS DARCY BALLANTYNE A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English York University Toronto, Ontario September 2018 @ Darcy Ballantyne, 2018 !ii ABSTRACT This study analyses literary depictions of the Canadian city in representative contemporary (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) English-Canadian short fiction and poetry by black Canadian writers Austin Clarke, Wayde Compton and Dionne Brand. Although their generic and aesthetic approaches as well as the specific historical contexts out of which they emerge vary considerably, the works in this study each exhibit what Édouard Glissant, in his eponymously titled book, calls a “poetics of relation” between the past and the present (42). Their work chal- lenges our understanding of the contemporary city by drawing attention to and dismantling enduring hegemonic and homogeneous representations of the Canadian metropolis and by rearticu- lating the city through a black gaze and sensibility. Clarke's, Compton's and Brand's representations of black city spaces, places and peoples probe the entrenched historical and ideological sys- tems and legacies that continue to influence black urban geographies and the ways they are por- trayed in and by various media, institutions and the collective imagination. Their politically charged and socially relevant literary inquiries lead to complex, layered, hopeful and often con- tradictory, ambivalent and vexing visions of the contemporary Canadian city. Each depiction of the city confronts and complicates the ongoing material and theoretical erasure of black urban spaces and places in the nation and the national literary corpus that helps define it. Importantly, these idiosyncratic fictional and poetic portraits both invoke and dispel dominant notions of black city dwellers, black spaces and black places as socially and culturally monolithic harbin- gers of violence, disorder, disease and death and thus ask us to re-evaluate our own assumptions about contemporary Canadian metropolitan life. !iii The present analysis approaches the topic of the contemporary black Canadian city in lit- erature through a compelling theoretical perspective that argues for a direct, ongoing and con- tiguous relationship between the colonial plantation and the contemporary metropolis. Specifi- cally, this project examines literary representations of the contemporary city under the rubric of “plantation futures”—a spatial-temporal conceptual device that reads contemporary black urban spaces through and against the history of the colonial plantation and the distorted logics that arose from the perverse culture of plantation slavery (McKittrick, “Plantation Futures” 2). !iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not be complete without the support of many people to whom I am greatly indebted. I wish to thank my committee—Leslie Sanders, Andrea Davis, and Ray Ellen- wood—whose individual talents inspired me to discover ideas and potentialities in my research, my thinking, and in myself. I am especially grateful to Leslie for her tireless support, encouragement, persistence and friendship. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues in the graduate program at York; in particular, my friend Janet Melo-Thaiss whose scholarly conversations and companionship spurred me on over the years. Thank you to the friends who have kept me going throughout this lengthy project: Jane Learn, Annie-France Gravel, Jim Gardner, Patrick Crean, Helen Yee, and Janet Emmett. Special thanks to André Champoux for his enduring love and affection and to Robert Enright for his in- telligence and friendship. I also wish to acknowledge my friends in the Toronto yoga and fitness community. My deepest gratitude goes to my sister, Dr. Peri Ballantyne, without whose example of rigorous scholarship, interest, support and encouragement the project would not have seen com- pletion; to my brilliant brother-in-law, Dr. Mark Ridgway; my niece Maegan Ridgway; and my nephew Luke Ridgway for their companionship and love along the way; to Mom and Pop who would, I hope, have been proud; and to my mother, Heather Ballantyne, and my late father, Austin Clarke, for beginnings. I must also express my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding this project over two years of my doctoral studies. !v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................v Prologue ...........................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Introduction: “Giving Canada a Black Eye”: Seeing, Recovering and Reconstruct- ing the City in Contemporary Black Canadian Fiction and Poetry .................................................6 Chapter Two: “Landscapes of Fear”: Reproducing the “Past-Tense Village” in the Present Tense City in Austin Clarke's When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks ......................35 Chapter Three: “The Desire to Remember” Hogan’s Alley: Archiving the “Imaginative Configu- rations” of Black Urban Space in Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond .....................................95 Chapter Four: Dionne Brand’s thirsty: Charting the Cartographies of Possibility in Toronto’s “Ur- ban Barracoon” ............................................................................................................................172 Conclusion: Ellipsis, Colon, Spring: The Unfinished Story of the Contemporary Black Canadian City ..............................................................................................................................................211 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................225 !1 PROLOGUE In 1985, while working on the pilot phase of a larger project aimed at teaching school children in Ontario about archaeology, archaeologist and historian Karolyn Smartz Frost and her team unearthed remnants of early black life at a downtown Toronto site. Under the yard at the Sackville Street School on Sackville Street and Eastern Avenue, in what is now known as the Moss Park area of the city, Smartz Frost found broken pieces of tableware, various personal ephemera and the relics of a homestead which pointed to the land's previous residential use. City records named black former slaves Thornton, a “cabman,” and his wife Lucie Blackburn as the residents of the home and out buildings at 70 Eastern Avenue but there was little other extant documentation about the couple who had occupied the house (Smartz Frost xi). Over two decades of painstaking archival and anecdotal research in the United States and Canada yielded a fuller account of the Blackburn's role in plantation slavery in the American south, their decision to navigate the treacherous route to freedom in the North via the Underground Railroad and the significant social, cultural, political and economic contribution they made to the city they called home for more than fifty years. Smartz Frost's meticulous and detailed biography of the Blackburns, I've Got a Home In Glory Land: The Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, recounts the tale of their harrowing slavery-to-freedom journey from Louisville via Detroit to Toronto using the disguises, forged documents and clandestine meetings with sympathizers that characterized their stepwise trajecto- ry to Canada. But as Smartz Frost reminds us in her Introduction to the biography, the Blackburn's story was first literally “written ... in the soil” of the city of Toronto where “frag- ments of pottery and bits of broken glass” from their home along with the material-biological !2 remains of Thornton, who died in 1890, and Lucie, who died five years later in 1895, attest to their presence and mark out the space they created together in their adopted city. In 2002, simul- taneous ceremonies in Louisville, Kentucky, and Toronto, Canada, to commemorate the Black- burn's journey from slavery in the American plantation system to freedom in the Canadian city via the Underground Railroad, culminated in the erecting of matching plaques memorializing the Blackburn's lost story which was “recover[ed] from the ground” almost half a century after their deaths (351).1 Smartz Frost modestly claims that she and “the archaeologists at the Blackburn site made no shattering revelations, discovered no priceless treasure, and certainly unearthed no gold” (350). However, their invaluable discovery points to rich theoretical grounds because the narrative that “lay peacefully ... [in the earth beneath the city of Toronto] for almost a century” has its roots in the Louisville plantation, the history of which constitutes the first chapter in the Blackburn's story (350). As Smartz Frost's archaeological and biographical work demonstrates, examining the plantation past is an important first step to understanding the workings of the metropolitan

Load more